Poverty is such a waste

I have wanted to write about the wastefulness of poverty for some time now but never found the words.

There is too much around us; I don’t have to prove this point. Because I’d consider poverty being too much even if a single child around the world wakes up with belly rumbling from hunger, even if one mother stops eating to be able to keep her children fed.

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11 thoughts on “Poverty is such a waste”

It’s a crying shame. For the most part people are very much aware of the problems of poverty, and there is a lot of belief and effort that goes into reducing it. For me it’s the minority of people sitting on fortunes and living the life is kings that is a real issue. Who really needs to own hundreds of millions anyway?

I’m also surprised to see that more women than men live below the breadline in the US. Obviously there are more struggling single mothers but men are bigger risk takers so there are more homeless men in urban areas. Perhaps the homeless are not possible to be correctly counted as data.

@Alex: Inequality is a very big issue, agreed. I won’t go as far as to blame the people who build immense fortunes but I have a bone to pick with a system that allows suck polarisation. As to women, there is a lot of data showing that women are generally less wealthy (statistically speaking) than men – this seems to be changing somewhat lately.

Poverty is the cause of many evils. It’s interesting because government assistance gives very little in the way of food stamps, and healthy food can be more expensive and many people in poverty tend to buy the most food possible, so they end up with unhealthy food. As a result, the US has this onslaught of people who are both obese and starving to death. It’s heartbreaking.

@Daisy: I hear you and feel the pain of seeing this. And you know what? I have never really been poor (have been in financial trouble but this is different) but every time I’ve had ‘poverty mindset’ i’ve put loads of weight on. You not only stock up on food; you also eat more at every meal because you don’t know where the next meal will come from and your brain is screaming ‘store, store’. As it happens, what you eat is mostly rubbish anyway and you end up obese and starving.

Looks like the premise of the infographic is parallels this book: “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much”. Basically, the worry and stress of making ends meet reduces available bandwidth, and the poor keep on making bad decisions, or passing up on opportunities. I got this book for the Kindle, and I think I’m going to get the hard copy as well to re-read at leisure.

@101Centavos: I’ll get this book as well – thanks for mentioning it. I’m getting increasingly interested in these matters and asking myself the question why and how we have come to tolerate such inequality.